Ben Hecht Quotes

The house has to serve comfort. The work of art is revolutionary; the house is conservative.

I always say I'm an artist with the soul of a realtor.

Conservatism and respectability have their values, certainly; but has not the unconventional its values also?

We have learned to whittle the Eden Tree to the shape of a surplice peg, We have learned to bottle our parents twain in the yelk of an addled egg. We know that the tail must wag the dog, for the horse is drawn by the cart, But the devil whoops, as he whooped of old; It's clever, but is it art?

Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art

We have learned so well how to absorb novelty that receptivity itself has turned into a kind of tradition- "the tradition of the new." Yesterdays avant-garde experiment is today's chic and tomorrows cliche.

The faculty of art is to change events; the faculty of science is to foresee them. The phenomena with which we deal are controlled by art; they are predicted by science.

Avant-garde art jousts with propriety, but takes care never to unseat it.

I always want to encourage young artists. As the budgets get smaller, that might provide an opening for younger artists and more experimentation. Budgets had gotten quite large for art, as they had for architecture. I'm not going to cut back. The minute someone walks through my door, I go, "That's my thing and you got to let me do it."

Money and writing appear to be mutually exclusive.

This is what it is the business of the artist to do. Art is theft, art is armed robbery, art is not pleasing your mother.

I think there's no question that there's a reason why small children make great art and why slightly bigger children don't. And it's because small children don't worry about what anybody else thinks and slightly bigger children start to worry about these things.

Did you find any artists complaining who don't already complain all day long about everything? No. But have you ever met a dealer who thought it was okay? Well, you maybe. It's still the art world. It's meant to be extreme. It's supposed to stand for liberty or whatever but really it's an extremely conservative environment. Why does everyone wear jeans? Because it's practical. To say something is taboo-breaking is to assume you have a clear image of the quality of a dealer. But there are certain dealers who always work this way.

I like playing with a popular cliché and making it my own by half-embracing it, half-disemboweling it.

It is precisely those artists and writers who are most inclined to think of their art as the manifestation of their personality who are in fact the most in bondage to public taste.

I think it's very important for any actor to eventually produce, and create the projects they want to create. I believe it's all a part of the same art form, which is storytelling.

I think some people are just very passionate that things remain the way they were when they were kids.

All adventuring is rash, and all innovations dangerous. But not nearly so dangerous as stagnation and dry rot. From grooves, cliques, clichés and resignation - Good Lord deliver us!

It is fatal for art if it is forced into official respectability and condemned to sterile mediocrity.

If you do something that's really original, you discover why everybody else does it the other way, usually. There's a reason cliches exist, 'cause they work.

Art that submits to orthodoxy, to even the soundest doctrines, but lacks imagination and deep self-expression is lost leaving only the craftsmanship.

Only lifeless mechanisms move along faultlessly straight lines and compass circles. In art the surest way to destroy is to canonize one given form and one philosophy: that which is canonized quickly dies of obesity, of entropy.

In fact, whatever exists in the universe, in essence, in appearance, in the imagination, the painter has first in his mind and then in his hands ... it lies in his power to create them . . .

I think that just the nature of art education in schools, it's about packs, you know? Like, we're young wolves running together, creating a consensus. And consensus is antithetical to the art process.